James Howard Kunstler

Because you know what the last word was, what the last sentence was of that meeting.

It was, fuck it.

That is the message of this form of architecture.

The message is, we don't give a fuck.

We don't give a fuck.

Okay, the pattern of Main Street USA, in fact, this pattern of building downtown blocks all over the world is fairly universal.

It's not that complicated.

Buildings more than one story high, built out to the sidewalk edge so that people who are, you know, all kinds of people can get into the building.

Other activities are allowed to occur upstairs, you know, apartments, offices, and so on.

You make provision for this activity called shopping on the ground floor.

This is how you compose and assemble a downtown business building.

And this is what happened in Glens Falls, New York, when we tried to do it again, where it was missing, right?

So the first thing they do is they pop up the retail a half a story above grade to make it sporty.

Okay, that completely destroys the relationship between the business and the sidewalk, where the theoretical pedestrians are.

They'll never be there as long as it's in that condition.

Then because the relationship between the retail is destroyed, we pop a handicap ramp on that.

And then to make ourselves feel better, we put a nature band-aid in front of it.

And that's how we do it.

I call them nature band-aids because there's a general idea in America that the remedy for mutilated urbanism is nature.

And in fact, the remedy for wounded and mutilated urbanism is good urbanism, good buildings, not just flower beds, not just cartoons of the Sierra Nevada mountains.